Author: Ashley Spear

Spring activities in the MMM Lab

Check out the latest activities from the MMM Lab. April 19th: Nadia hosted a spring party for the MMM Lab. Activities included corn hole, spikeball, ladder ball, and an egg hunt. April 12th: Post-doctoral researcher, Nadia Kouraytem, presented work from the MMM Lab at the APS Users Science Meeting at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. Her presentation was entitled “Microscale characterization and modeling of additively manufactured metals”. On the same day, Prof. Spear gave a seminar at Ohio State University on “A multi-scale, multi-physics modeling framework to predict spatial variation of properties in additive-manufactured metals”. April...

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New $3M grant from DOD

University of Utah Mechanical Engineering professors Bart Raeymaekers, Ashley Spear, Tim Ameel, Wenda Tan, and Owen Kingstedt have received a $3M grant from the Department of Defense to continue research efforts on metal-based additive manufacturing. The grant is a collaboration with Colorado School of Mines and Carnegie Mellon University. To access the original news article, click here....

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Upcoming presentations on coupling MD simulations with machine learning

Postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Aowabin Rahman, will give two upcoming presentations on his work, entitled, Designing High-strength Carbon-nanotube Polymer Composites Using Reinforcement Learning Algorithms Integrated with Molecular Dynamics Simulations. The work will be presented at the following conferences: American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts Thursday, March 7, 2019 TMS Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas Monday, March 11, 2019 The work is a collaboration with researchers from Michigan Tech and is sponsored by the NASA STRI US-COMP.  To learn more about US-COMP, click here. ...

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Congratulations to PhD Candidate, Brian Phung!

MMM Lab member, Brian Phung, successfully defended his PhD proposal on January 7th.  He also learned, on the same day, that his first-author paper entitled “A voxel-based remeshing framework for the simulation of arbitrary three-dimensional crack growth in heterogeneous materials” was accepted for publication in the journal Engineering Fracture Mechanics.  The paper will soon be available online. Great work, Brian!...

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Site-Specific Property Maps of 3D-Printed Metals

New work from the MMM Lab and collaborators describes a framework for predicting spatial variability of mechanical properties in 3D-printed metals using multi-physics modeling. The work was recently published in Modelling & Simulation in Materials Science & Engineering. The work is supported by the US Department of Defense Office of Economic Adjustment under award no. ST1605-17-02. To access the full article, click here....

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3D Grain Mapping of Open-Cell Aluminum Foam

MMM Lab and collaborators recently published an article describing experimental/synthetic data fusion to generate 3D grain maps of metal foams. Lead author, Jayden Plumb, was named the 2018 UofU Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher. Plumb is currently a Ph.D. student in Prof. Sam Daly’s lab at UC Santa Barbara. Support for the work was provided by the NSF DMREF program under grant no. CMMI-1629660. To access the full article, click here.  ...

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New Funding from DOE NEUP

A $776k grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) will enable a team of researchers from the University of Utah and Utah State University to benchmark microscale ductility measurements for reactor-grade metals. The team members include Owen Kingstedt (PI), Jiyoung Chang, Ashley Spear, and Ryan Berke. The team members will leverage their combined expertise in physical experimentation, modeling, and microfabrication to identify best practices for scaling mechanical measurements made on microscale-thickness specimens to the macroscale....

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Brian’s paper published in Engineering Fracture Mechanics

Brian Phung recently implemented a flexible numerical framework to simulate arbitrary 3D crack growth in heterogeneous materials. The framework involves adaptive remeshing on a voxel-based geometrical domain.  Due to its modularity, the crack representation is de-coupled from the crack-evolution rule and material constitutive model (in the uncracked region), providing significant flexibility to investigate new or existing crack-growth criteria. The work has been published in the March 2019 issue of Engineering Fracture Mechanics. To download the article, click here or contact the MMM Lab. This work is supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program Grant No. FA 9550-15-1-0172 and...

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Invited talks in Texas and Spain

Prof. Spear recently gave two invited talks: one in Texas and one in Spain. On October 3rd, Spear visited Texas A&M in College Station to give an invited seminar entitled A Multiscale, Multiphysics Modeling Framework to Predict Spatial Variation of Properties in Additive-Manufactured Metals.  The work is a collaboration with Prof. Wenda Tan (Utah) and Prof. Tony Rollett (Carnegie Mellon University). MMM Lab member Carl Herriott is leading the research effort. On October 11th, Spear gave an invited talk at the Society of Engineering Science (SES) conference in Madrid, Spain. Her talk was entitled Multiscale Characterization and Modeling of 3D...

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